By: Anthony D’Angelo
The UTMB One Health laboratory played a pivotal role in a new UTMB Molecular Diagnostics Training Program which premiered last month. Conceived by Professor Peter Melby, MD, Director of the Division of Infectious Diseases and Director of the Center for
Tropical Diseases at UTMB, the Molecular Diagnostics Training Program’s goal is to train various medical scholars (physicians and medical scientists) in the basics of molecular lab techniques. This year’s course was taken by six scholars;
including incoming UTMB Infectious Disease fellows, a Clinical Microbiology fellow, and an Internal Medicine resident. The training focused on various techniques, including DNA and RNA extraction, polymerase chain reaction (PCR), real-time and conventional
reverse transcriptase PCR (RT-PCR), and gel electrophoresis.
In addition to learning molecular techniques, students were also presented with various research vignettes and didactic training by twelve UTMB Infectious Disease faculty and staff. These vignettes covered a variety of research areas being pursued by
UTMB faculty investigators including antimicrobial stewardship, etiologies of acute febrile illness, pandemic preparedness, zoonotic respiratory viruses, murine typhus, cryptosporidiosis, and Clostridioides difficile, among others. Didactic instruction
covered viral epidemiology, sampling, and an introduction to One Health approaches. The inaugural course ran from July 7th to July 22nd, 2022 and is planned to be held on an annual basis.